Yet another futuristic wishlist item

[Behdad Esfahbod]

On Fri, 19 Dec 2003, =?ISO-8859-1?Q? Nils O. Sel=E5sdal?= wrote:

> On Fri, 2003-12-19 at 13:50, Thomas Hille wrote:
> > Am Do, den 18.12.2003 schrieb Miloslav Trmac um 16:29:
> > > On Wed, Dec 17, 2003 at 03:45:56PM -0500, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> > > > Can't we change the default partition labels from "/", "/home",
> > > > ... to something like "mces:/", "mces:/home", ... where "mces" is
> > > > the machine name?  It would reduce the glitch when connecting two
> > > > hard disks both with FC installed to a single machine.
> > > We have only 16 characters in the label. That can be tight even
> > > without the hostname.
> > > 	Mirek
> >
> > Nevertheless this is an issue. Some days ago I installed the hd of
> > another pc into my own. But fc mounts the last "/" partition it finds -
> > ie on the highest drive. That is obviously always the wrong in the case
> > when there are two. The only way to avoid mounting the wrong partition
> > was to remove all that labeling stuff and use plain /dev/hda1 style
> > entries in the fstab.
> >
> > Maybe we should drop using labels at all? To be honest I don't know what
> > they are good for anyway. Or instead of using the hostname use a random
> > number? Other suggestions maybe?
> Atleast not the hostname. I would rather not have remember to update the
> label when I set/change the hostname.

You don't have to.  The labels are generated by installed, and
are used in a couple of places (/etc/fstab and /etc/grub.conf).
I really can't see how _handy_ can them be but I have had dozen a
problems with them.  And last time I tried vanilla kernel I
compiled didn't parsed them and I completely removed that.
A few digits (4) from hdd's UUID may be a good option to prepend.

behdad